Looking Out.
Looking In.
Always Edgy.

March 2010

30 March 2010

When a writer friend pointed me to a story titled Losing It in the New York Times Magazine of March 28th, 2010, I
rushed out to my living room and pulled out the magazine to read what,
seemingly, was a heartwarming story of a woman in the writing world who pulled
herself out of misery.

In her essay, Browning lays bare her life after being laid
off from House & Garden in November 2007, just a little before Thanksgiving. She
writes lyrically about how she was sucked into the quicksand of dread and
depression but willed her body out of the vortex of over-eating and
slovenliness by discovering the joy of gardening and unearthing the meaning
of the slow life in a new home.

I was getting ready to shed a few tears while reading the
exquisite excerpt from her memoir, Slow Love, when I decided to dig around a bit
in the weedy garden that was supposedly Browning’s life following her layoff.
What I dredged up made her story wilt right in my hands.

During the two and a half years after she was given the pink
slip, Browning disposed of the first house and garden, moved into her other,
second, house and garden, deftly shifted gears into the blog lane with an
impressive online presence called Slow Love Life, A Conversation with
Dominique Browning,
and careened into the fast lane of publishing success with a book deal for Slow
Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness.

Browning has a three-decade resume that writers like me
would kill for. She is the author of three books,
has written for O magazine, Food
& Wine, The New York Times Book
Review, and Departures. She has also been an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly
and Newsweek and she has a column,
“Personal Nature”, that is her “distinctive take on all things environmental”
for the Environmental Defense Fund website.By her standards, I should be overloading on Prozac and,
simultaneously, getting sloshed on Guinness Stout with a hint of lime. May be
there is something seriously wrong with me for deflecting rejection like a
woman? “The folding of the magazine was ruthless,” Browning writes,
recalling the shock of the closure of the magazine. “Without warning, our world
collapsed.”

I couldn’t help reflecting, meanly, on that boomerang called
karma. Did Browning ever think of how the freelance writers she assigned
stories to at House & Garden might have felt when the stories they bled over were
slashed without warning by executive editors like her?The paltry kill fees aren’t even enough
to cover a sandwich and a drink at a Manhattan deli. Almost daily, I see
freelance writers (many of them single women) on my writers’ forum handle
rejection with a proud face, uncertain where the next assignment is going to
come from. They lumber on in the petering market, taking any writing
project–whether it’s a ghostwriting project, a newsletter creation assignment,
a copywriting job–to inch towards the monthly income they need.

Did Browning
care to ponder over how her sob story would hardly resonate with the stable of
many thousand writers who are now out of a job, thanks to the slow demise of
print journalism? Most of all, did she realize how her very brief season in her
vegetable bed of rejection couldn’t even compare to the perennial tossing into
the compost slush pile that freelance writers like me endure–over and over and
over–from editors like her?

When I went back to the essay after reading Browning’s bio,
I was rotting with fury. For a reason that’s wedged somewhere between a
woman’s homing instinct to play mother hen to her family and her primordial
need to uphold the domestic fortress, I could simply not swallow Browning’s
tying her umbilical cord to her cubicle.

“Without work, who was I?” she
wonders. When she discusses unemployment
and her mental state, my brain is on rototill mode. “Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed,” she
writes.

I happen to be in touch
with many talented mothers who, for reasons of their own, are unemployed, yet,
passionately involved in school-related and community-related activities. They
are making the public school system in the United States a much better place to
be, while women like Dominique Browning have been showing America how to make
the home and garden pretty and nice.

I couldn’t glean much about her life as a mother upon
reading the essay. But I do hope Browning took days off to be with her two
boys, baked brownies with them, played an active part in the parent committee
at their school, fretted about how they fared at school and asked them how they
dealt with a mother who was intensely committed to her work at a national
magazine. I bow to her ego and her rabid need to support herself all her life.
But I do wonder how many employed women, especially given Browning’s legacy,
will turn soggy and limp in that brief, uprooted state of unemployment.

Behold a topflight editor like Dominique Browning with a rolodex of
topnotch contacts–which would ultimately put her transparent memoir in the
pages of nothing less than the NYTimes magazine so that Atlas, her publisher,
can be guaranteed whopping sales–spiral into a “whiplashing tailspin” of
despair and depression?

08 March 2010

The weekend after Godman
Paramahamsa Nithyananda was caught on camera, reaching for actress Ranjitha
even as he was preaching the Bhagvad Gita, my friends in the Bay Area couldn’t
stop cackling.

At a party last Saturday, an old friend
walked up to me, a puzzled look on her face. “Do you know to whom this
belongs?” she asked, pointing to a beaded chain curled snugly in her palm.
Seconds later her face crumbled into raucous laughter. According to her, the
chain had fallen off during her private dalliance with none other than the
Swamiji himself the previous week. My wild gang of friends had presently found
something and someone to make fun of and so the jokes sputtered and sparkled
late into the night until it was decided that someone among us would get his or
her hands on the original video and hold a party to discuss the lurid
details.Along with the puns and
jabs came dissections of the creativity of tweets on the subject and, naturally,
more serious discussions on matters of religion and faith.

“I’m sorry, I’m a skeptic,” said
one man, a self-realized agnostic. “I really cannot believe that another human
being can take me to whoever is up there.” Then there were those like my
husband who do believe in the tenets of Hinduism but prefer to visit temples to
admire temple architecture and socialize with temple staff and visitors.The recent agony and ecstasy of yet
another saffron-attired guru only served to cement his cynicism over godmen.

“Every Godman gets into some
trouble or other. And that’s why I’d rather not trust anyone wearing orange!”
he claimed. He had just found scientific evidence to prove his theory that most
swamijis (other than the one that his parents owed loyalty to, of course) would
rather choose frequent flier miles on Earth over a gnarly one-way trek on foot
to the gates of Heaven.

Hours after the news broke, my
son and daughter(who pray to
their favorite elephant-headed Ganesha twice a year at the end of their
respective semesters) chimed in with profound theories constructed on years of
study and contemplation.

“Mom, and this is why I say what
I say,” my newly minted 16-year-old son turned philosopher observed. “I don’t
trust guys who say they’re vehicles to god.”My son’s current god is Vladimir Nabokov whose book, Lolita,
has transported him, unfortunately, to bad karmic places where good boys don’t
go.

My daughter’s reaction to the
Swami files was tepid because, when you’re turning twenty in a few weeks, you
know everything about life and nothing, absolutely nothing, has the power to
shock anymore. “Cool!” she said perfunctorily and then proceeded to tell me why
composer A. R. Rahman and tuft-sporting singer Hariharan were her gods of
choice, at least for now.

I wonder if my husband and my
kids are wiser for their skepticism. I don’t have a spiritual guru of my own
but if someone introduces me to theirs, I’ve been happy to meet them, listen to
their lectures and find out what they have to say. I’m always in awe of people
who have the power to mesmerize a million others and, in the process, feed the
poor, build hospitals, raise money for disaster relief and, in little ways,
make the world a better place.From what I can see, Swami Nithyananda has, through his many centers,
conducted eye-camps, medical camps, staved off the hunger of many poor people
and educated countless children who, otherwise, may not have seen the inside of
a school. And that’s why, whenever I see another saffron-robed Indian Godman
fall from his gold-plated perch, my heart goes out to him and to all the
million disciples scattered around the world. The devotees must feel betrayed;
a part of them must hate to come to terms with that worm of doubt now crawling
through their hearts.

One of my friends is a follower
of the fallen Swami Nithyananda. A relative of mine is also a follower, one who
wears a Nithyananda bangle to show her allegiance to him. She is still a
staunch supporter of her guru and believes, of course, that the tape making the
rounds is the work of some scheming conman whose technical expertise is in
splicing images on video. I’m sorry to see these hapless devotees suffer the
ignominy of wagging tongues and tagging twitterers. The Internet has turned
into a loud, garish lounge for gossip: scandal today is feasted upon, judged,
and archived for instant recall.

On another, lighter note,
however, when I watched the video of Nithyananda, several questions kept
burrowing into me. The man sported a Calvin Klein-lookalike underwear instead
of a meager, tattered loincloth. He was lounging in bed watching television. Do
modern Swamijis watch television? And why do they need pedestal fans? Do they
feel heat? Weren’t they beyond day-to-day cares? Didn’t they live the life of
mendicants, eating thin porridge, sleeping on cold stone floors, sporting
slippers made of wood, fanning themselves with fans made of coconut fibre?
Instead the holy man in this video had a pedestal fan, a vast bed with a
headboard doubling up as a shelf on which a number of things were kept within
reach, an air purifier (I found out later that the lying camera was attached to
it), creams, medications and what have you. If this man had really given up the
worldly life, the first thing to go should have been fancy underwear, don’t you
think?

Recalling those Brooke Shields
advertisements of the eighties, what came between him and his Calvin Klein
should, really, have been “nothing.” Instead, what purportedly came–pun never ever intended, my faithful readers–between
him and his Calvin was a shapely woman named Ranjitha. No wonder my female
friends are breathless as events unfold in a scandal involving the next famous
Indian man of god. Little wonder they’re screaming in anticipation: “Yes! Oh
Yes! We want more!”